Windows Update

Today's rant is about Windows Update. This has been a thorn in my side for a while...Over the weekend I decided to start fresh with a new VM (in VMWare in this case) of Windows 7. This should be a nice and easy install. I chose Windows 7 since I have a few hundred legit enterprise licenses that I can use from when I was on BizSpark. Installation was easy, as expected.Then I started the Windows Update journey.The first few batches of updates came without issue. Quickly downloaded and installed.Then I got SP1.Once SP1 was installed it was all downhill. The next time I ran Windows Update it was just stuck there "checking for updates." I let this run overnight a few times to no avail. I let it just sit and stew a few times. Nope.Apparently this is a known issue... of course SP1 seems to have broken things and MS didn't fix anything.I needed to install the April service update manually, then the June one before anything was responsive again.Even then... after it found the updates it needed to install well over 200 individual updates that took over 12 hours to finish. What the hell?As this is going down I keep thinking of how pleasant OS X tends to be. Just install an update now and then -- and they are mostly cumulative so you don't need to install all of them to get things working. Just so much easier.